Most of us have been filled with wonder at one point or another about space, which sadly begins to fade as we grow older and realize that there is so much we don’t and will never know. Luckily, there are those who never lost that enthusiasm for the cosmos and work hard to find answers. Here are 20 facts about space you should know.
1. According to astronauts who have returned from space missions, space smellslike a mixture of hot metal, welding fumes and seared steak.
2. There is a phenomenon that scientists call bizarreness gravitational lensing which happens when gravitybends light to the point that objects appear in a different location to where they actually exist.
A solitary black hole betrays its presence solely through gravity, which bends and warps the light of more distant objects.
3. Due to an amazing coincidence of the Moon being 400 times smaller, and 400 times closer than the Sun, they both appear to be the same size.
4. At $150billion, the International Space Station is the most expensiveobject ever built.
At the size of a football field, The International Space Station is only as roomy as a five-bedroom house, and travels at a speed of 17,500 mph. This means that Astronautsonboard the International Space Stationview fifteen sunrises and sunsets every 24 hours. One interesting fact is that the station has a special water treatment plant that turns urine into drinking water. In such a hostile environment self-sustainability is one of the key considerations astronauts have to keep in mind.
5. Astronauts typically gain two inches in height while in space.
Due to the lack of gravity, the spines of astronauts elongate by up to three percent while they are in space. This is a similar effect to what happens while you sleep as less gravitational force is being applied to your spine while you lie down which is why we are fractionally taller when we wake up as opposed to going to bed.
6. Two teams of astronauts have discovered a large reservoir of water floating in spacethat is the equivalent to 140 trillion times the water of our ocean.
7. In space the Sun appears white as opposed to yellow here on earth.
Due to Earth’s atmosphere, shorter and more energetic wavelength photons of light are scattered and deflected before they reach the ground. This means that we usually only see particles with longer wavelengths such as yellow, orange and red. This explains why to our eyes, the Sun appears yellow instead of white.
8. On Venus, it snows metalgalena and bismuthinite.
9. Stars have been discovered by NASA that are cool enough to touch.
10. Did you know that if the Sun were the size of a beach ball, Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and Earth would be the size of a pea?http://www.unbelievable-facts.com/2015/03/facts-about-space.html11. A visible halo around the Sun or Moon means a storm is soon to come.
Image source
The halo that is visible on occasion around the Sun or Moon is caused by ice crystals from high cirrus clouds. There is an old saying that says “ring around the moon means rain soon” and there is truth to this as high cirrus clouds often proceed a storm.( source)
12. Most typical asteroids (such as Eros) contain precious metals worth more than $20trillion.
Image credit: NASA( taken from)
13. Earth can be seen as a pale blue dot in the picture below – 3.7 billion miles away.
Image courtesy: NASA/JPL/Voyager
This photograph was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 at a distance of 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) away. In the picture above, Earth is sized at a fraction of a pixel (0.12) against the vastness that is space. Even from within our own solar system, this picture provides some insight into how small we are in the cosmos.( source)
14. A Moon-sized diamondestimated at close to 10 billion trillion trillion carats has been found in space. It has been named “Lucy” in reference to the Beatles’ classic, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
Image source: news.bbc.co.uk
15. Did you know, this year NASA plans to grow plantson the Moon?
Image source: huffpost.com
16. The dwarf planet“Ceres” between Mars and Jupiter has never been visited by a spacecraft or photographed in detail. What makes this puzzling is that Earth-bound telescopes have revealed two large bright shining spots on the surface within a crater.
Image source: space.com
17. If humans could survive on Titan, they could fly around by flapping wings attached to their arms. This is because the atmosphere is so thick and the gravity so low.
18. A Russian report of 33 cockroaches conceived in space has shown that they are tougher, stronger, faster and quicker than cockroaches on Earth.
Image source
Cockroaches have always been known to be tough and perhaps the only organisms to be able to survive a nuclear war. However, it has been shown that cockroaches raised in space gain super abilities compared to their earthbound brethren.( source)
19. The Moon is slowly leaving us behind at a rate of 3.78 centimeters (1.5 inches) per year.
Image source: news.discovery.com
The Moon has always played an important role in the collective cultures of earth. Even before humans, it served to protect the World from dangerous asteroids, and today has a direct effect on the Earth’s axis and the ocean’s tides. Sadly, this close relationship will one day come to an end as the Moon is gradually moving away from us at a rate of 3.78 centimeters (1.5 inches) per year.( source)
20. According to Stephen Hawking, humanity won’t survive without leaving the Earth. If what he says is true, we may have less than 200 years to conquer the final frontier.
Image source: www.scifiideas.com
In an interview several years ago, Stephen Hawking expressed his concern that humanity is at risk of two different kinds of catastrophes. The first may be inflicted on ourselves, whether from climate change, nuclear or biological war; and second, by the cosmos, whether from an asteroid, supernova or gamma-ray burst, or perhaps less likely, by alien invasion. Sadly, whether we agree with him or not, it will take a long time for humanity to take the next step

Hope they didn't bring those cockroaches back

The ones we get here are enough stress

Baba419:
Hope they didn't bring those cockroaches back

The ones we get here are enough stress

lol, they should take humans so that we'll have superman

nice ones

I just saved it in na fone

Nice one. Pls post more

please seun, lalasticlala and other mods why is this educative thread not on front page.. please sirs do the needful..

Space Probe Crashes Into Mercury
Scientists say a final, fond farewell to the intrepid space probe, MESSENGER(MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) as it crashes into Mercury. Mercury is the first planet in our solar system and closest to the Sun. This probe was launched in 2006 with the goal of collecting in-depth data on the first planet from the sun. The valiant spacecraft has far outlived its original expected lifespan of one year. Having collected an additional four years worth of data, scientists were able to uncover the secrets of Mercury in more detail than ever before.
MESSENGER arrived at Mercury in 2011 and since then has completed over 3,000 orbitsof the planet. Mercury’s orbit around the sun is very elliptical, and it’s been tough to keep MESSENGER’s trajectory up for so long.
"Pretty much all the instruments are still doing great, so that makes it a little harder for the craft," Jim Raines, a MESSENGER instrument scientist, told the BBC.The mission was always constrained by the amount of fuel needed to maintain such a difficult elliptical orbit—which ran out on April 24, 2015, thus signaling MESSENGER’s final countdown.
The final landing site will be on the side of Mercury closest to the sun. This means that we will never be able to contact MESSENGER again and will probably lose around 1,000images of Mercury in the process.
The crater that will be produced in the aftermath of the crash is predicted to be around 16 meters (52 feet) wide. The impact of the three-meter-wide (10-foot-wide) spacecraft will be so powerful because Mercury has no substantial atmosphere to speak of. Space debris that falls through Earth’s atmosphere slows down as it burns up, often disintegrating before reaching the surface. On Mercury, MESSENGER will barely slow down and will impact at a speed of 3.91 kilometers per second(8,750 miles/hour).
Earlier this month, mission scientists released fresh images that superimposed years of spectrometry data about the chemistry of the planet's surface, illustrated in different colors, onto black-and-white images built up from thousands of smaller photos.
Even though this is a nostalgic time for scientists, it’s also a time to celebrate MESSENGER’s incredible contributions to space exploration. It has gathered 250,000 imagesof Mercury and ten terabytes worth of scientific measurements for scientists to sift through. It found evidence for the existence of water ice in the shadows of Mercury’s craters where the sun never shines and discovered that the magnetic field of Mercury is off-center. There was skepticism that MESSENGER would even make it to Mercury, let alone orbit the planet for four years.
Jim Raines added: "To be honest, I've seen this day coming for a long time and it's just one of these things that I've not been looking forward to. I'm really going to be sad to see it go."
source: www.iflscience.com/final-salute-space-hero-messenger-it-crashes-mercury

Snapped using their 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope, the superb image below was released this week by the European Southern Observatory, showing part of the Milky Way in Ophiuchus, the much neglected thirteenth zodiac sign.
Darkness in the sky can represent an absence of stars. But when marked out against a forest of stars such as this, it indicates dark molecular cloudsthat block out the light of everything behind them from our point of view. This particular dust cloud is known as LDN1774 and like other molecular clouds, it is only a few degrees warmer than absolute zero. It is from these clouds that future generations of stars will form. As Ursula K. Le Guin wrote: only in darkness, light.
While European and Asian astronomers were seeing patterns in the stars, Indigenous Australians made out the shape of an emu, not from the stars but from the darkness, including clouds like LDN1774 and Barnard 68 that hide parts of the Milky Way from our sight.
Source: www.iflscience.com/space/come-see-darkness